Saturday, March 3, 2018

The Post-Putin Era Will Arrive on March 18th, Krastev and Pavlovsky Say

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 3 – In a 3,000-word essay
for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Ivan Krastev and Gleb Pavlovsky
argue “post-Putin Russia” will arrive following the March 18th
elections because Putin will focus on
transferring power to a new “Putin generation” and elites will act “not by the
president’s presence … but by the expectation of his departure.”

Many assume that with Putin’s
departure, whenever that does occur, “the regime will undergo a major
transformation.”That is unlikely, the
two analysts say because there is no group pressing for such change and young Russians
are even more pro-Putin than are their elders” (ecfr.eu/publications/summary/the_arrival_of_post_putin_russia).

The two analysts, one based in
Vienna and the other in Moscow, say that this means “Moscow will likely
maintain its current foreign policy objectives even after Putin’s exist from
the Kremlin, but without him Russia will probably be a weak international
player,” taking a backseat to its emerging security partner China.

The key passages of their argument
are:

The paradox
of 2018 can be summarised as follows: Russia is in deep social, political, and
economic crisis. … But, while Russians are aware of this state of affairs,
regime change is highly unlikely. There is no critical mass of people demanding
radical change and, contrary to Western fantasies, Russians under the age of 25
are among the most conservative and pro-Putin groups in society.

But while
Russia is not on the edge of regime change, the regime is changing. The coming
presidential election will mark the arrival of post-Putin Russia regardless of
whether Putin remains the head of state for the next six or 16 years. This is
because, following the vote, the behaviour of Russia’s major political and
economic players will be defined not by Putin’s presence in the system but by
the expectation of his departure.

Most Western
analysts fail to see the pending arrival of the new era primarily because they
assume that post-Putin Russia will be an anti-Putin Russia … Many Western
observers find it difficult to understand that, for most Russians, Putin is not
simply a president but the true founder of the post-Soviet Russian state …
similar to that of the national liberation leaders of the 1960s and the 1970s.
Therefore, his successor – whoever he or she is – will claim to defend Putin’s
legacy even while intending to break from it.

In the 2018
election, Putin is not so much a candidate as a “prize”: the real suspense is
in which of the Kremlin’s competing elite groups will be able to credibly claim
to have achieved victory for him.

Members of
the Russian elite now know that the president is focused on designing
post-Putin Russia – even if they have no power to influence his choices. Putin
is doubtlessly aware that the absence of any vision of the country’s future
without him could dramatically weaken his standing in the eyes of ordinary
Russians.

In our view,
four factors will shape this vision.

The first of
these is Putin’s belief that the country will face a hostile international
environment and that its rivals will use all means at their disposal to weaken
and fragment it. Therefore, he sees post-Putin Russia as Fortress Russia … But
Putin is also aware that the “Crimea effect” cannot be replicated, and that the
legitimacy of the government and the survival of the regime will depend on its
ability to satisfy the basic material needs of the population.

The second
factor is Putin’s conviction that Russia has nothing to gain from imitating
Western-style institutions – or, put differently, Russia should imitate what
the West is doing (interfering in domestic politics) and not what it is
preaching.

The third
factor is that, while members of the Russian elite once perceived modernisation
as centred on Western-style institutional reform, they now view it as an
attempt to maintain Russia’s competitiveness in the development of new
technology.

The fourth
factor is Putin’s conviction that Russia needs not a single successor – as it
did under Boris Yeltsin – but a successor generation. He sees the coming
transition as a transfer of power from his generation to the “Putin
generation”, comprising politicians who came of age during, and have been
shaped by, Putin’s rule.

The
fast promotion of the sons and daughters of senior figures in the elite is
critical to the president’s plans for post-Putin Russia. There has been a major
change in the behaviour and career trajectories of leaders-in-waiting in the
last few years: if the sons and daughters of the Yeltsin-era elite tended to
study and work abroad, those of the current elite often study in the West but
usually work in Russia – many of them for the state.

Post-Putin
Russia has begun to arrive not only because the president is preoccupied with
his vision for it; some key members of the Russian elite have also started
preparing for the realities of this new era. They have begun to transform the
access to the president that is their major source of power into a political
currency that will retain its value after Putin leaves the Kremlin.

Despite these
significant domestic changes, Putin’s position as the ultimate decision-maker
on foreign policy will ensure that Russia continues its aggressive efforts to
secure a role as a global power. In this, a perceived need to counter American
influence will be the dominant rationale of Russian foreign policy.

There will be
no decisive breakthrough in the negotiations on the conflict in Ukraine’s
Donbas region under Putin … US-Russia relations will remain frosty. The Kremlin
will continue to be openly hostile to the US while being respectful and
constrained in its criticism of Donald Trump. Moscow fears further US
sanctions, but also hopes that some international actors will see Congress’s
latest round of sanctions as having gone too far, pushing them to limit their
exposure to the volatility of American politics.

The emerging
Moscow-Beijing strategic alliance is the most significant outcome of the
current crisis of the relationship between Russia and the West. Events in 2018
will demonstrate the Kremlin’s commitment to linking its economic future to
China and trying to manage the power imbalance in the partnership by investing
in military capabilities and maintaining a high international profile. …
Russians sometimes draw parallels between the Russia-China relationship and the
Franco-German alliance, claiming that Russia, like France, is a security-minded
global power while China, like Germany, is an economic superpower reluctant to
engage in military operations. There are evident flaws in this analogy, but
Russians prefer to ignore them.

In the coming
years, the major challenge in policymaking on Russia will be that, while the
arrival of the post-Putin era will reshape Russia’s domestic politics, it will
do little to curb the country’s aggressive behaviour as an international actor.
Moscow will likely maintain its current foreign policy objectives even after
Putin’s eventual exit from the Kremlin. But without him Russia will probably be
a weak international player: it is Putin rather than the Russian state that has
regained the status of a great power.